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Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee 11 March 2021

11 Mar 2021 · S5 · Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee

Item of business

Cultural Sector (Impact of Covid-19)

Iain Munro Watch on SPTV

Again, there was a lot wrapped up in your questions. I will try to make sure that I cover everything. The vast majority of funds, including the culture organisations and venues recovery fund, have a core set of objectives at their heart. One objective is around protecting jobs and another is around preventing insolvency. Creative Scotland’s brief should not be misunderstood in that we are not an organisation that purely operates in the subsidised sector—as fundamental as that sector is, of course. Our field of view looks across the spectrum of the creative economy and the creative industries, of which the subsidised sector is clearly a part. The new funds have enabled us to deepen and strengthen our relationships or to create new relationships with different constituencies that we would not ordinarily have had a relationship with. It was a Scottish Government decision to include nightclubs in the brief for the scope of the culture organisations and venues recovery fund. Not for a minute do I imagine that nightclubs will remain a long-standing part of our work. However, when we were asked to accommodate them within the fund, we moved to find a way of making sense of that. It was about protecting jobs and preventing insolvency, as well as being agnostic in art form terms, if you like. To stay true to our brief as Creative Scotland, it was important to us that, as a key component of support for the creative sector as a whole, we found a way of making the fund relevant, in support of nightclubs. The night-time economy team at Scottish Enterprise, who had a role to play as part of the running of the fund and the decision-making process around it, helped us to find a way of legitimately providing support through the fund to contribute to nightclub funding. That involved curated programmes of music. We are not talking about mixing desks or the jukebox in the corner, as such; we are talking about nightclubs where there had been a very creative approach to the programmes of music that they played. The other observation about the culture organisations and venues recovery fund is that it was completely open access. It was about protecting jobs and preventing insolvency, but its intention, like that for the majority of the funds—in fact, all of them—was not about addressing loss of income as compensation. It was about organisations’ demonstrable need for funding to sustain themselves in the period of closure until they could return to trading again. Because it was open access, we could not predict where, geographically, we would get applications from or the type of organisations that would apply. They were all in the mix as long as they could satisfy the core eligibility criteria for the fund. We had a panel that, with input from partner organisations, made the decisions on those awards. You may recall that we announced an initial significant tranche of decisions. We had more than 300 applications, and a small number required a bit more interrogation, so after the initial announcement, we did a bit more work on the residual numbers and made a second set of awards. The culture organisations and venues recovery fund was all-encompassing, and I think that it definitely enabled us to see into different parts of the wider economy than we would ordinarily expect to deal with. The experience has been valuable, but we do not expect the relationship to come into Creative Scotland’s brief in the longer term. You mentioned the grass-roots music venues stabilisation fund, which is legitimately something for us to get involved in. I think that many privately run businesses that, outwith the pandemic, would not expect to have a relationship with us have welcomed the opportunity to create a connection with Creative Scotland. Although the grass-roots music venues stabilisation fund is about providing core support to stabilise the organisations that are being supported, it is ultimately about the work that they do to nurture and support talent in grass-roots music. A complex mix of factors and considerations is involved in all these funds to make them run effectively. We have done our very best to try to afford the widest spectrum of opportunity while making sure that, through our own governance and processes, we deliver funds with maximum efficiency but also with transparency and accountability. That is why we have published the outputs and the data on our website.

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Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee 11 March 2021

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